APPENDIX I RUSSELL'S HIDDEN BERGSONISM The title above certainly sounds strange and even facetious; for Russell's attitude to Bergson was not only that of philosophical disagreement, but of positive, almost personal dislike. This dislike accounts for Russell's frequent misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Bergson's thought - the misrepresentations which often border on caricature. It is true that this caricaturing was due more to Russell's inattentive reading than to a conscious desire to ridicule. Russell's own reading of Bergson was accurately characterized by Russell himself when he wrote that "to read an author in order to refute him is not the way to understand him." (OKEW, 47)*). Sometimes, however, the desire to ridicule is clearly discernible; for instance when, ignoring all the distinctions which the author of Creative Evolution draws between instinct and intuition, he confuses them, adding with humor that intuition is strongest "in ants, bees and Bergson." (PB, 3.) In any case, inattentive reading is as much a sign of intellectual indifference or hostility as a distorting caricature. Whether the touch of personal animosity in Russell's attitude was due, as it was submitted, to his suspicion that Bergson "lured" Whitehead away from him, is not certainl , but it would not be too surprising; philosophers are human beings too, Russell more than any other. Although we pointed out a number of times the deep differences separating Bergson's thought from that of Russell, let us briefly recall those which are the most basic. In this way we shall have a contrasting backdrop against which the unintentional agreements between them will appear even more striking. One of Russell's sentences in Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) summarizes the contrast between his and Bergson's philosophy in the most concise way: "Both in thought and in feeling, to realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom." (OKEW, 167). In Mysticism and Logic he repeated the same sentence, but somehow more cautiously: "Both in thought and in feeling, even 336 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS though time be real, to realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom." (ML 21-22; italics mine). But this note of caution disappears altogether in the sentences which immediatel} follow: That this is the case may be seen at once by asking ourselves why our feelings toward the past are so different from our feelings toward the future. The reason for this difference is wholly practical: our wishes can affect the future, not the past, the future is to some extent subject to our power, while the past is unalterably fixed. But every future will some day be past: if we see the past truly now, it must, when it was still future, have been just what we now see it to be, and what is now future must be just what we shall see it to be when it has become past. The felt difference of quality between past and future, therefore, is not an intrinsic difference, but only a difference in relation to us; to impartial contemplation, it ceases to exist. And impartiality of contemplation is, in the intellectual sphere, that very same virtue of disinterestedness which, in the sphere of action, appears as justice and unselfishness. Whoever wishes to see the world truly, to rise in thought above the tyranny of practical desires, must learn to overcome the difference of attitude towards past and future and to survey the whole stream of time in one comprehensive vision. It certainly would be difficult to find in the philosophical literature a passage which would be more anti-Bergsonian in spirit as well as in letter. It is a perfect illustration of the view that "all is given" (tout est donne) - the view which eliminates becoming, transforms the future into a concealed present and wipes out the qualitative differences between the successive phases of time. It is the view of all strict determinists from Democritus to Laplace, and Russell is merely consistent when he says that "it is a mere accident that we have no memory of the future". (OKEW, 234). It eliminates the concept of causation in its original and dynamical sense by substituting for it the relation of logical co-implication in which the future is deducible from the past and vice versa; thus there is not such a thing as "direction of time" or "asymmetry of becoming". In Russell's words: "We shall do better to allow the effect to be before the cause or simultaneous with it, because nothing of any scientific importance depends upon its being after the cause." (OKEW, 226.) This fundamental difference between Russell's and Bergson's views shows itself clearly in their attitude toward Plato and Zeno. While for Bergson, "the intelligible world" of ideas resembles the world of solids in its essential character except that its constitutive elements are "lighter, more diaphanous, easier for the intellect to deal with than the image of concrete things", for Russell in 1912 Plato's doctrine of ideas is one of the most successful attempts to solve the problem of the universals which RUSSELL'S HIDDEN BERGSONISM 337 he accepted with some terminological modifications. He was aware that this view leads to a very sharp kind of dualism: Thus thoughts and feelings, minds and physical objects exist. But universals do not exist in this sense; we shall say that they subsist or have being, where 'being' is opposed to 'existence' as being timeless. The world of universals, therefore, may be also described as the world of being. It is true that he somehow softens his commitment to Platonism by the following rather sober and remarkably impartial passage: The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life. The world of existence is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without clear plan or arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and feelings, all the data of sense, and all physical objects, everything that can do either good or harm, everything that makes any difference to the value of life and the world. According to our tempera­ ments, we shall prefer the contemplation of the one or of the other. The one we do not prefer will probably seem to us a pale shadow of the one we prefer, and hardly worthy to be regarded as in any sense real. But the truth is that both have the same claim on our impartial attention, both are real, and both are important to the metaphysician. (P. 100; italics added.) The passages just quoted show clearly the complexity of Russell's mind as well as the resulting instability of his views. While explicitly admitting his preference for the realm of being, he still conceded then the reality of becoming only to deny - only after two years - the reality of time altogether while at the same time ridiculing Kant for degrading time to a mere appearance. (OKEW, 116-117). But in the passage just quoted another note creeps in - an uneasy awareness that the metaphysical preferences for either being or becoming are perhaps mere personal idiosyncracies, due to individual differences in temperament. A tendency to prefer the metaphysics of Being, together with an underlying note of radical scepticism are two characteristic features of Russell's thought. Comparison of Bergson's and Russell's attitude toward Zeno's para­ doxes will show again the basic contrast in their philosophical views, but at the same time will bring out in the most unexpected way certain hidden affinities. Bergson's view of Zeno's paradoxes was consistently held through all his books: the paradoxes arise from the fallacious assumption that motion and time are divisible in infinitum, that is, that the only parts of them which are indivisible are geometrical points and durationless instants. This assumption is based on the confusion of the movement 338 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS itself with its motionless trace in space; it is this motionless trace, not the act of moving (la mobilite, Ie mouvant), which is infinitely divisible. "At bottom, the illusion arises from this, that the movement, once effected, has laid along its course a motionless trajectory on which we can count as many immobilities as we will. From this we conclude that the movement, while being effected, lays at each instant beneath it a position with which it coincides. We do not see that the trajectory is created in one stroke, although a certain time is required for it; and that though we can divide at will the trajectory once created, we cannot divide its creation, which is an act in progress and not a thing." 2) Russell's comment on Zeno in his Principles of Mathematics (1903) was significantly different: After two thousand years of continual refutation, these sophisms were reinstated, and made the foundation of a mathematical renaissance, by a German professor, who probably never dreamed of any connection between himself and Zeno. Weierstrass, by strictly banishing infinitesimals, has at last shown that we live in an unchanging world, and that the arrow, at every moment of its flight, is truly at rest. The only point where Zeno probably erred was in inferring (if he did infer) that, because there is no change, therefore the world must be in the same state at one time as at another. This conse­ quence by no means follows. (PM, 347; italics mine.) In other words, Russell agrees with Zeno that we are living in "an unchanging world"; but against Zeno he claims that the world is not in the same state at every moment.